Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

A Useless Obama Addresses the Useless United Nations

By Alan
Caruba

I don’t
know who looked more pathetic when President Obama addressed the United Nations
Assembly on Tuesday; him or the assembled ambassadors, many from nations where
human rights, justice, and liberty don’t exist. Like the League of Nations
before it, the United Nations has long since demonstrated how useless it is.

Founded in
1945, by 2003 just before the U.S. received the UN blessing to invade Iraq
there had been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths at that point. We would
stay in Iraq until 2011.

Since
2003, there have been conflicts in the Central African Republic, Yemen, an
insurgency in South Thailand, a civil war in Chad from 2005 to 2010, a conflict
between the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas, a war in Somalia from
2006-2009, and in 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, seizing part of its territory.
In 2010-11 there was an Ivorian civil war. Et cetera!

In the
years since 2003, the largest war of all has been the effort to eradicate the
global Islamic jihad.

The U.S.,
while not engaged militarily, has been in a technical state of war with Iran
since our diplomats were seized in 1979 and there has been no formal resolution
to the war between North and South Korea, only a ceasefire. The Israelis have
fought several wars since its founding in 1948 and remains in a state of war
with Gaza; territory it ceded to the Palestinians in a fruitless quest called
“land for peace.”

Listening
to the President request that the UN Security Council pass a resolution
threatening “consequences” against the Syrian regime if it does not give up its
chemical weapons, I was struck by how weak the once greatest superpower,
America, has become. To his credit, Obama said, “If we cannot agree even on
this, then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the
most basic international laws.”

True. But
the UN has a long history of not enforcing its own Charter or its Declaration
of Human Rights.

As 2013
began, fifty UN member states had yet to have paid their dues for its 2012
budget. The United States, the largest contributor, had been assessed $568
million. Nine nations contribute about 70% of the budget. They include Japan,
Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, and China.

There is
nothing the UN does that cannot be done by individual and independent
international organizations. In so many ways, the UN either does not solve
problems or is an integral part of them. For example the UN has maintained the
UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 exclusively for Palestinian
refugees. Several generations later, the support it provides does not take into
account the refusal of the Palestinians to cease from demanding the destruction
of the Israeli state.

When not
ignoring various conflicts, the UN keeps busy creating various treaties whose
purpose is to centralize power in the UN. It is hard to say which one is the
worst, but the Convention of the Seas deserves to be high on the list as an
attack on national sovereignty. There’s a treaty that would take away
everyone’s guns—like that’s going to happen—and one intended to get people to
stop smoking.

The UN has
been a congenial gathering place for many of the world’s dictators and some of
their nations have served on its Human Rights Council, turning it into a
complete mockery of human rights. Its Middle East clique of nations wants to
make it an international crime to say anything critical about Islam.

I would be
remiss if I did not mention that the greatest hoax of the modern era, global
warming, was directed from the UN via its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. One cannot even begin to calculate the billions wasted since the 1980s,
nor the man-hours of serious scientific research that was diverted to it since
then.

In
addition to the President’s devotion to the lies about “climate change”,
Obama’s address to the General Assembly only demonstrated how delusional about
international affairs he has been before and since assuming office in 2009.

“Together we’ve also worked to end a decade of war. Five
years ago nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in harm’s way, and the war in
Iraq was the dominant issue in our relationship with the rest of the world,”
Obama said. “Today, all of our troops have left Iraq. Next year, an
international coalition will end its war in Afghanistan, having achieved its
mission of dismantling the core of Al Qaida that attacked us on 9/11.” Both
nations are in the process of imploding.

Given the past week’s events in Nairobi, Kenya, the
church bombing in Pakistan, and the continuing attacks on U.S. military personnel
in Afghanistan, does anyone believe that the mission of dismantling the core of
al Qaeda has been achieved?

This is, after all, a President who could only manage to
get France to support his original intention to bomb Syria by way of achieving
regime change. None of our traditional allies expressed any support and the UN
remains stranded on the sidelines.

No one wants to follow the Commander-in-Chief into battle
and with good reason. He has a record of retreating from combat. He still wants
to close Guantanamo.

“We’re no longer in a Cold War”, he told the delegates,
but what we have learned over the past five years is that, just because he
believes his own delusions, that doesn’t mean they’re reflect reality. We are
in Cold War 2.0 with Russia even if he doesn’t think so. Putin went out of his
way to mock him. Prospects for any successful negotiations with Iran don’t
exist, but don’t tell Obama that.

Thanks to his speech writers, Obama always manages to say
the “right things.” What we know, however, is that while he can talk-the-talk,
he cannot walk-the-walk.

What we know about the United Nations is that it
should be told to leave the U.S. and its headquarters turned into condominiums.
We are surely not getting any value for the money we have pumped into the UN.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.